Knowing that these gifts came from T'Challa and Wakanda, Batman instantly understood everything.
There was no longer any need for him to deliberately pry information out of Silver Sable's company.
Since T'Challa had no direct way to contact Batman, he had still chosen to hand the package to Silver Sable, who then dispatched someone to deliver it to Parker Industries, and finally had Peter Parker—or rather, the Peter that worked there—pass it along to Batman.
It was a ridiculously roundabout route, but the more convoluted the path, the more it proved just how airtight Batman's secret identity truly was.
Unless they were someone he trusted completely, Batman would never give out a direct Bat-family contact method.
Back when he'd needed to keep Peter Parker's identity hidden from Silver Sable, he had made a special Bat-communicator just for her.
Besides her, Batman hadn't even given the three scientists on Brothers Island their own personal comms—they could only use the ones installed in the lab.
After placing all three Wakandan gifts together with an electronic signal blocker, Batman didn't linger long at Parker Industries.
After giving CEO Alyce some business instructions in his Peter Parker persona, he dove straight back into the Batcave beneath Manhattan.
Upgrading the Arkham suit was something the Oracle AI could only help with to a limited extent—there were simply too many technical hurdles involved.
It required Batman to personally devote time to it.
Still, some things took priority. Only after running seven or eight different verification methods to confirm that the chip, the Kimoyo beads, and the vibranium had no tampering or tracking did he isolate a single computer to examine the chip and analyze the beads.
"T'Challa wasn't lying. There's nothing hidden in the chip or the Kimoyo beads, and the vibranium is clean."
It was two full hours later before Batman finally stopped studying the three items.
"Daddy, are these chocolate beans?"
Venom slithered out of its habitat tank and perched on Batman's shoulder, staring curiously at the Kimoyo bead pinched between Batman's fingertips.
The next second, the bead vanished from Batman's fingers. As if by magic, a piece of chocolate appeared in his hand instead.
"They are, Robin."
Venom's eyes went wide. Its body twisted like a black python as it coiled around Batman's arm, searching high and low, but it couldn't find where Batman had hidden the bead.
It was only acting out of overflowing curiosity, though—that curiosity was quickly overtaken by chocolate lust. With a happy little nom, it swallowed the treat whole.
Then it crawled back up Batman's arm and settled on his shoulder again.
Batman didn't resume analyzing the three gifts.
Limited by the Batcave's current lab conditions, he couldn't dig any deeper into vibranium right now. But once the Alfred AI was online, Batman was confident he could do what he once did with kryptonite—deduce the complete molecular structure from theory alone and build a vibranium model from scratch, out of nothing.
Whether he had this palm-sized piece of vibranium or not wouldn't make much difference.
The same went for the rapid-regeneration bio-gel. In Gotham, Batman would have found it incredibly useful, but right now he was inhabiting Peter Parker's body—a body whose raw specs and healing factor already far outclassed what the gel could offer.
At most, the gel was contingency insurance: something to fall back on if, one day, Peter Parker's superhuman physiology and healing factor ever completely failed him.
The tech itself was generations ahead of its time, but Batman had no intention of monetizing it.
Dr. Otto Octavius's artificial sun project and the limb-regeneration/prosthetic integration research Professor Connors was working on were already more than enough to catapult Parker Industries into the stratosphere. Adding regeneration gel would just be gilding the lily.
The Kimoyo beads, on the other hand, could actually be useful. If Batman ever truly lost everything and had nowhere else to turn, he could reach out to Wakanda.
But if that day ever came—if every plan and every Batcave failed—asking Wakanda for help probably wouldn't amount to much anyway.
And the odds of that happening were practically zero.
Even being unexpectedly flung into this entire new universe hadn't rendered all of Batman's plans useless.
Since arriving here, he had never once worried about Gotham's safety or whether the Justice League could handle crises without him.
He had prepared contingencies in Gotham long ago for the exact scenario of his sudden, untraceable disappearance.
In fact, Batman was certain that right now, back home, Superman, Green Arrow, the Flash—even Lex Luthor—were all moving forward exactly according to his plans.
Superman would don the Bat-cowl to keep Gotham safe. Green Arrow would step in as strategist. The Flash would scour past and future timelines looking for him.
Only… Batman was now almost certain this universe wasn't any branch of his original reality, which meant the Flash's search was doomed to fail.
"Robin," Batman said to Venom, "tonight we're running another test. I need you ready."
He let Venom sit on his shoulder in stunned silence while he focused entirely on upgrading the Arkham suit.
Batman hadn't forgotten what happened the first time he and Venom met—how exposure to bright light and high-frequency sound had triggered Venom to spawn offspring, giving birth to Anti-Venom inside Eddie Brock's body.
For the upcoming trip to New Mexico, he intended to leave nothing to chance.
"The plating needs to be thicker—make room for the internal medical suite."
"FRIDAY, I'm going to upgrade you as well. If Peter ever finds himself in real danger, I want you to be able to forcibly take control of the suit and fly him to safety."
"Maximize flight speed while keeping the armor stable. I'm willing to sacrifice almost every weapon module—this suit was never designed for war anyway."
"Oh, right. Peter did say he doesn't want a suit. If I just hand it to him he'll refuse…"
"I'll need to add biometric signature recognition and park it on one of Stark Industries' satellites. The moment Peter's vitals spike, it drops from orbit straight through the atmosphere…"
––––––––
Stark Tower penthouse.
Tony Stark was designing an armor whose appearance and function were completely different from his own Mark III.
Painted silver and red, the suit looked noticeably bulkier than Tony's Mark III—partly because it had to house its own arc reactor, partly because the plating itself was significantly thicker.
Half-open on its stand, the armor officially designated "Rescue Mark I" was currently being worked on by Tony himself. Tools in hand, he made adjustments to the internal systems while occasionally issuing orders to the JARVIS AI.
Tony had built a brand-new artificial intelligence specifically for this Rescue suit and named her "FRIDAY." The voice model came from a fashion model he'd slept with a few times.
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